


Places in Time, Moments of Mine

by ExploretheEcccentricities



Category: Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Magic, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, This is Quirin's POV, not my best work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 10:28:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23349913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExploretheEcccentricities/pseuds/ExploretheEcccentricities
Summary: After losing his son, Quirin gets the opportunity to bring Varian back for one week, during which he tries to make sure Varian lives his best life, makes as many memories with him as possible, and contemplate whether he actually knew his boy after all. Oh, and fulfill his debt to the demon he has promised ultimate power. Varian, on the other hand, can't remember anything.AU-Canon Divergence. In which Zhan Tiri finds there is another hurt soul she can manipulate to her whim. Some parts of the TTS season 3 do not happen. You'll know which ones later in the story.Alternate ending and progression to "And So He Left." It's technically an AU but I used it for fluff reasons. Please read author's note at the beginning.
Relationships: Quirin & Varian (Disney), Quirin/Varian's Mother (Disney)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 49





	Places in Time, Moments of Mine

**Author's Note:**

> Alternative ending/sequel to "And So He Left"-so an AU, I guess? I'm pretty happy with my current sequel, but this is exclusively for fluff/angst lovers. Don't worry, I'm still continuing the series "Or So They Thought;" this is just an idea that was stuck in my head and absolutely refused to leave. Please consider this separate to whatever happens in the other series except for the first work, "And So He Left."  
> I needed fluff. I was writing angst and I needed fluff because I don't know when I'm going to see my family again. Then I needed evil.  
> I don't even know if I'm going to continue this or not. I just felt like I needed to write it.

The demon in Quirin awakens as a gentle flame, low in his stomach and loud in the echoes of his thundering heart.

Here, in the world of the living, the air in graveyard is still and flat, the earth silenced in mourning for the soul that had just departed.

All remains silent and succumbs to the ways of the world, but one soul.

In front of an open grave stands a large, stoic figure, encloaked in black, holding a smaller, limp body in his hands. The bloody body is one of a broken boy who had surrendered to the struggles of life, blissfully oblivious to the soul he had unknowingly hurt. 

As the relentless wind bellows and the trees shiver to silence him, the man’s voice escalates into a string of powerful, rhythmic words with a strange, archaic tone, as though singing. But his voice is rough, unpleasant and jarring to the awakening spirits, so all sound acquiesces once more.

Then it begins to throb like dull ache, a distant sting, before it evolves into a steady fire, consuming his every sense and climaxing to sear into his skull, carve out his heart, tear away the remnants of helpless sorrow that only manifests as the mist beings to appear.

Quirin allows his son’s pain to become his own-to engulf him, smother him completely. It pounds on him from all sides, like a pulsing heart, a bleeding wound that will remain forever open.

Then the irrefutable yet inexplicable glimpse of sanity is withering away like the decaying flesh of the body in his arms, wilting like the gentle flame in a bellowing torrent of wind.

His world is swept rapidly into a vortex of iridescent blue, scintillating so profoundly it makes him shield his eyes and nearly drop the body.

Then the mist parts like a curtain, and Quirin is floating motionlessly in midair. All of the worldly surroundings have disappeared to make way for an endless abyss of dark blue, as though the sky has cleared of all stars. Yet, Quirin can see everything clearly and vividly.

Though Varian’s body remains limp in his arms, a pale blue, barely visible image of the boy hovers just above Quirin, within his reach. It is sprawled and frozen in the moment of time his soul left him-almost as though he is still falling.

Then the witch appears-a small, spout child immaculately emerging from the lick of the steel blue flames that had been created.

“Child of the Dark Kingdom, what could I possibly do for you?” Her voice is poised with control, smooth and serene in the anticipation of what he has come for.

“Give me my son back.” He whispers, his voice cracked and waspish.

“But…I don’t have your son. He rests in your hands…as does his fate.”

“Please! You’re an ancient sorceress. You can-you must be able to do something.” Quirin’s voice lowers as his mind frantically searches for a way, an offer, the distant, desolate fear alleviating for a brief, disconsolate moment. “I-I would give you my own soul. Anything of my possession.”

The witch throws her head back to an alarmingly abnormal angle, laughs in a manner that echoes loud and clear with mocking jeer. “What, pray tell, am I to do with a soul as ineffectual as yours?”

“Please!”

He is enveloped in a whirlwind of energy, spastic and eccentric as it curls around his heart and caresses his deepest anguish with a tantalizing stroke of fate, as though it wishes nothing more than to wrap around it and tear every semblance of sanity from its clutches.

The claws are burning, digging straight and persistently into his heart, which is already sore from the lacerations of the gruesome grief it had been afflicted with earlier that night.

“Please, I need my son back! I need-I need that time back! I missed so much. I miss him too much!” Quirin sobs, allowing the burning claws to sear into his flesh from where they’ve penetrated and carved out the insides of his heart.

“I do not give gifts to mortals.” She hisses disdainfully, allowing a flippant yet graceful roll of the eyes as she turns away slightly. But then the witch pauses, and for a trepidatious moment, Quirin can feel her eyes piercing through him, rummaging through the remnants of his abused heart. She steps back, and the feeling withdraws itself as quickly as it came, like the talons of a hungry hawk. “But who am I do deny the brethren of my old friend?”

Quirin’s eyes widen, and he stares at her with open shock and bewilderment. A frigid draft hits him harshly, whistling in his ringing ears with the harrowing apprehension that trickles along the tendrils of his wavering sanity-the small, barely perceptible semblance of humanity that he grips for fear he would fall into an abyss much like this one, accept that he had no more reason to live.

When Quirin does not answer, the witch continues slowly yet purposefully, as though each word is a spike meant to impale, twist, and permanently etch into his consciousness. The reverberations of her echoes thrum unpleasantly in tandem to Quirin’s aching heart.

“You see, when Cassandra grabbed the moonstone, I was only partially released from my prison… in this lesser form. I appear in response to your pain and despair-including your anger and fear. I can only conjure things you wish to be true, and give life to any form for a short time.”

Quirin pleads, voice weak and wilted with grief. “Then give me my Varian back. Bring him back.”

“Are you sure this is what you want? My magic will only last so long, as it is not what it used to be. His body is not meant for the world of the living-not anymore. He will wither and die, more slowly and more painfully than his first death.”

Quirin pauses, inhaling sharply yet shakily. _Was_ this what he truly wanted? Were things better off the way they were, now, with his son’s cold, dead body weighing limply on his arms… the bright eyes forever robbed of joy, the ever-inquisitive mind never whirring, the beautiful brows never shifting and shaping as he animatedly babbled about things Quirin didn’t understand…Could his son have died a less tragic death?

“That is…” The tentative edge remains, like a sliver in fire, and Quirin’s head shoots up. “I know something much more powerful. Something that could bring back your boy forever.”

The dread coils thick in his stomach, jabs tightly at his faltering resolve. “You’re talking about the sundrop, aren’t you?”

“The sundrop may be inactive…for now.” Then, her eyes widen, sending the petrifying shudder through Quirin’s spine and abruptly searing its way into his mind to leave a scorched thought for dead. “But if I were to wield both the sundrop and moonstone…I would be able to give this poor soul tenfold of the power I can gift now.”

“Alas, my vision of power was snatched away from me when Demanitus concealed their location forever. But now, the foolish wielders are human, wear them for pretty hair and petty promises for power.” She scoffs drily. “

Quirin’s face slackens as the understanding dawns on him, crashes unto him in undulating waves of anticipating horror, his wide eyes casting down to stare intently at his son’s forever closed eyes, feel the forever gone beat that should be enlivening his every breath, right now. He knows the end of the story the witch wishes to craft-he knows the end of the sentence that will engrave the fateful gavel into the sands of time.

“If only there was a brave, skilled knight to retrieve them for me…” The suggestion hangs heavily in the cold, still air like an executioner’s axe, a seal on his fate, the open end of a closing door. Time paces with Quirin’s racing heart and batters his every breath adamantly, a thick knot slowly tying away the space in between.

“But-but how will I be able to-“

“Your entire youth was dedicated to the protection of this moonstone. And now, you serve the father of the sundrop. Yet you have the stupidity to ask me how you’ll manage? After what I’ve offered? Despite what they’ve done?”

Quirin looks away, gulps at the thick cluster in his throat that fractures every word and clogs every breath. It is dry with misuse, dampened with misery. “Varian…he didn’t want to live.” He is unsure why he is telling the witch this-unsure why this leak has escaped from the floodgates of his heart.

“Yes, I know about the painful circumstances of your boy’s death.” She is in front of him now, the bedazzling glint in her eyes no longer maniacal, the promises they offer no longer intangible. “I am not truly the heartless warlock you’ve been warned of from your childhood fairytales, dear knight. If I were to wield this power, I would grant eternal life. And no mortal will have to know loss or suffering ever again.”

For a moment, in the shock-like pulses of the demonic flare in the witch’s irises, Quirin can see himself, and the life he yearns to have - the life he had been denied the minute he had pushed his son away. The effervescence in Varian’s gleaming, inquisitive eyes, awestruck as they traced over his every wrinkle and laughed with a joy he would no longer remember. Alda’s gentle kiss, as her smooth palm brushed against his cheek with a warmth he would no longer know. They could have lived forever like this, in their own perfect little world…but instead, an eternity had to be quelled by the ephemeral, a hope killed by the inevitable.

The world churns unpleasantly as his feet connect with the land, and the very touch jars him agonizingly back to reality-back into the ephemeral world with its eternal unfairness. For in his arms lies his son, Varian, asleep with a pain he would never forget, cast out of a life he would no longer live.

“You will never hurt again. I promise.” She croons, she sings, and her breath weaves pleasantly into the hums of her voice, as though she cannot suppress her elation at the prospect.

Quirin does not answer, unable to look up from Varian's dead body.

“Alda was taken away too…many, many years ago.” The witch’s soft voice becomes distant, nostalgic. “Why don’t you ask for her too?”

“…Can I?” The hope is childish, merciless as the world he seeks to escape .

The witch cackles loudly, gasping in between as though it is the most ridiculous thing she has had the misfortune to hear. “No, foolish child. She is long gone. As will this boy, too, if you don’t make up your mind.”

Quirin raises his voice, heightened and hurting, shrill and despairing. “Please. Please bring back my boy.”

The admission is there, viciously wrung in the silence of his guilt, hovering tentatively within his grasp as though he can snatch it back, take it all back and run with this body, return Varian to where he rightfully belongs…

_No_ , Quirin insists. _He belongs with me_.

“Here is what is going to happen, my knight.” The witch leisurely strolls, interrupting his line of thought. “You have one week to retrieve the moonstone _and_ the sundrop for me. One week, to spend with your boy. One week, a prime opportunity for us both. Should you succeed, you and your boy will remain forever alive in this realm.”

Quirin’s heart momentarily gushes with joy, fluttering in the brief disbelief of what she is saying.

“ _But,_ if you fail, _I_ will be the one to take your boy away forevermore. And I can assure you- "

She rushes up to him in a swift yet sudden swing of her torso, and now she hangs in front of him, upside down, shocking him out of his wits. Her once sweetened words cut heavily through the silence as sharply as the way her irises constrict like a predator who has seen prey-greedy, grating, ungratified. “He will be in far worse pain than any death he could have suffered in the mortal realm.” The hiss sears its way into his lungs, wrapping its cold fingers powerfully around his roaring heart.

Quirin pauses, breath caught in his throat and stomach lurching. His mind races for a setback, a doubt he can refute, but he can find nothing within him to speak of.

“I don’t care.” Quirin finally gasps, gulping away the choked splutter that his scratchy throat now struggled with. “I don’t care…just- just please…Please, bring him back.”

“Are you sure? You can just leave things as they are. After all, not taking action is sometimes the best course of action.” The girl taunts, and then he stiffens with indignity, the familiar, self-righteous anger he always feels takes the reins and clashes against his thrumming skull as he tries to collect himself, control himself.

“You’ve been too strong for too long, Quirin.” She whispers almost sympathetically, and her whisper is mellifluous, stinging only slightly like an overtly sweet scent. It is tempestuous, imbuing him with an intoxicating euphoria, drawing him in like the oblivious rabbit treading into a hunter’s trap…but it promises him so much, and he has lost _too much_.

Quirin ponders. Who would he be hurting, after all? If he didn’t do this, he would have lost another loved one-another chance at living a happy life, another chance to hold his boy, another chance to kiss his warm, smooth forehead and hold his warm, smooth hand to his gristly stubble. He would have given up another chance to be with Varian.

And why would he give up this precious opportunity? For fear of betraying Corona? Anymore than how Corona had betrayed him, casting his son like this, turning him into a monster he was not? Coaxing his son to the window, tainting and haunting Quirin’s every remaining memory of him? Bringing Quirin to his knees again, seeking to bend and break him to the extent that he could no longer get up on his own, no longer walk straight on his own?

“You really have nothing left to lose.” She croons softly, and the sharp edge of the sentence digs itself deep into his heart, like an arrow that wasn’t meant to aim so well.

It was true. He had lost his entire family. He had lost his reason for living. He had lost Varian-not to the cruel tugs of fate’s strings, yet to the demon in the boy’s own soul.

And if Quirin looked back now, allowed Varian to remain dead now, the demon would remain, encrusted and dormant in the chasm that was Varian’s heart, now forever silenced from speaking and forever succumbed to the darkness of the world. His son had killed himself for a reason, and Quirin may never know. But he did not need to find out-he just needed Varian back so he could fix everything, fix _them_.

Then…then he could let Varian go. He would let Varian go when the time was right-he would allow him to gently slip into the arms of Death like a companion, let his own eyes be the last thing Varian ever saw. Varian could die then, as though drifting off to sleep, expecting to see Quirin again. Varian could die feeling how much Quirin loved him. Varian could leave knowing Quirin wanted him to stay.

“I’ll do it.” Quirin states with a tone of finality, anger hardening and gaze fastening on the promise in her eyes, the promise in her magic that would set him free from the burdensome sorrow that sought to plague him forevermore. He wouldn’t let it. He wouldn’t be brought to his knees again, he wouldn’t be consumed by the monster that was this inexplicable yet irrefutable grief again, he wouldn’t lose the battle to this unforgiving world with its unforgiving afflictions.

No one would feel what he had felt. He didn’t deserve to feel what he had been made to feel.

“But-But I don’t want him to be as he was. Right before he died, I mean. I want him…I want him to be truly happy.” There are no longer tears on his cheeks, as there are no longer fears in his heart.

“Oh, I can’t make or bring moments as such, my dear.” She coos patronizingly.

At a loss for words, Quirin’s eyes hastily flit over her hovering form, brows knitted in rumination as another idea finds form in his heavy tongue. “Then-then I want him to be a blank slate. I want him to not have any memory of hurting. Can’t you…can’t you revive him as though he’s awaken from a dream? As though…Alda is still alive?”

The witch stares at him with an unfathomable yet steady gaze, then closes her eyes. Her mouth opens, and faint whispers of the archaic language trickle out of her tongue, dissolving into the cold, still air like the mist that surrounds them.

Quirin is trembling uncontrollably, watching the iridescent shimmer coruscate in thin, wispy tendrils of brilliant blue, seeping into the chasm of his son’s heart. Then, Varian is set ablaze, the entire body glowing with a gentle yet powerful flame that danced through his every limb, slithering into every inch of his skin. Quirin can see the outlines of Varian’s abused, decaying flesh. The light blooms in the boy's chest, which rises and expands as though slowly being inflated. Varian…Varian was taking his first breath.

Then the light flickers, the breath is cut short, and the magic abruptly flees, snatching away Quirin’s hope with it as though a mocking hunter teasing his prey with food before it is trapped.

Quirin gasps, mouth still agape, breath still clogging his throat as the cold grips his stomach.

“Something’s holding onto him. Something isn’t letting him go.” The witch reassures him. She sounds genuinely perplexed herself, her brow slightly furrowed and furiously twitching as though she was struggling with no avail to maintain her composure.

Then, Alda appears in a haze of light blue. Her wavy, thick hair has become wayward and wispy, her once rosy pink skin pale and taut against her jutting cheekbones. She stares at him with heavy, accusing eyes, sparkling with an intimate love he had shared and a much more serious, much more gruesome disappointment that he had never known.

She is clutching their sleeping son.

It is not a beautiful sight, like the first time Quirin had ever seen her clutch their sleeping child: a long time ago, in a world far from this one, when he had rushed into the room expecting her to be hollering her head off, only to find her holding a swaddled bundle of happiness, their bundle of happiness, cooing at it like it was the most precious thing in the world. It is not a sight that makes Quirin burst into tears or rush forward to gather his family in his arms and hold them once more.

Instead, this sight stabs a scathing bout of trenchant tremors throughout Quirin’s entire being, and though he has just seen his son fall out of a window, he feels as though he has never felt anything worse in his life.

The world comes to an abrupt halt, and Quirin does rush forward, with an entirely different feeling and purpose, reaching out in vain to the misty cloud of magic and misery. “Alda! Alda, what are you doing?”

“You can’t take him away, Quirin.” Her voice is soft, defeated, heartbroken, as though she does not expect him to listen. Yet, it is trimmed with a more definite strength-certainty. Certainty that her words will drift as they are, unlike an arrow with an aim, linger in his sleep as they always do. “Let him sleep, _please_.”

“He can’t sleep. He has to come back with me.” Quirin insists tearfully. He can’t find it in himself to be elated that he is seeing his wife for the first time in years. He focuses his attention, his despair, the small semblance of sanity left to prod and tug insistently at Varian’s slumbering form.

“Quirin.” She whispers, her voice empty. “Quirin, _stop_.”

“Let go!” Quirin suddenly hollers, all restraint and patience gone, and she does not so much as shrink back. The ability to scream with purpose, to raise his voice and want to be heard for a reason, is a foreign and intoxicatedly euphoric sensation to the man who has kept his heart so close to the vest for too many years. Quirin clutches it like he clutches his son’s arm, like he clutches the remaining hope that it will be better-everything will get better. “Just because you left me doesn’t mean he has to!”

He looks up at her with tear-filled eyes, and cannot help but feel deep and arrant guilt and shame strike his pounding heart at the way her eyes flood with silent tears, the way her lips purse with that heavy disappointment as she slowly turns away. The subtle vulnerability is now strong and sweltering as her hands remains tightly clutched over Varian’s one arm-the only remaining arm she can reach. Quirin is now holding Varian’s other arm, and the boy’s body hangs restlessly yet limply over the dark abyss that divides their worlds.

Then, an unwarranted anger, bubbling deep within his gut and broiling in his very veins. A newfound pain, far more intense and unescapable than the first. Twisting and thrashing in the now constricting iron grip of a sanity that wishes to suffocate him, smother his last hopes and plunge him back into the cold, bitter world of hurt he so despairingly tries to escape.

Why did his own wife stand in the way of his happiness?

Why did she keep from him the very thing they had created and shared?

Why did she insist on being one of the many in the world who selfishly wanted to hurt him?

Hadn’t Alda always understood him, supported him?

Hadn’t Alda known the nights he had wept himself to sleep, the mornings he had refused to leave his bed after her passing?

Hadn’t she watched over him as he kissed their toddler to sleep, as he screamed over his- _their_ son’s broken body?

Quirin finally screams. “Let him live!” The strongest he has ever pulled, the loudest he has ever screamed. _She_ didn’t know what was best for Varian. _She_ was gone. _She_ had left them-left both of them. The soft, quaint whisper, the sliver of sane and human perception evades his mind, as though the last knock on a door, the last dying flower of a difficult winter. Alda hasn’t wanted to die. Alda hadn’t tried to leave him. Varian…Varian hadn’t tried to leave him, did he? Varian hadn’t wanted to die either, had he?

No. No, that did not matter. Quirin desperately shook his head, the ache clawing at his sanity and gnawing at his bones, abruptly quelling the small, gentle flame in his mind and setting his whole world alight. _He_ was the one who had stayed behind, who had looked after their boy when he had wanted nothing more than to take his own life. He was the one who wanted to make things right, do right by his child. Varian was _his_ child, and this strange woman-who had been a refuge from the world, an emblem of his comfort even long after her passing-was now the source of his hurting.

“Let. _Us._ Live!” The scream erupts from deep within his heart like the spew of a volcano, blinding and burning relentlessly as it wounds Alda’s grip and pierces into her being. It hurts to scream it, it hurts to hurt her. But it hurts most, being him, being here, being alive in a world without his son. Then, the translucent mist dissipates abruptly and quickly. The ghost-his wife-the thing that might or might not have been Alda-vanishes as rapidly as it arrived.

And now Varian is falling, but Quirin catches him this time.

The father finally catches the falling-the fallen boy, and now he shall stay, forever more.

Then Varian’s blue eyes flash open.

The demon inside Quirin finally slumbers, unbeknownst to the darkness it had awakened.

**Author's Note:**

> Was it ok? Let me know what you think! (No flames please :))  
> For anyone who's confused about why Zhan Tiri wants Quirin to take the moonstone from Cassandra, it's because in this AU, Cassandra is much more doubtful of why she's betrayed Rapunzel. Quirin is more of a stand-by.  
> I don't really plan to focus so much on this antagonist-Quirin plot until the later chapters...the next few could just be fluff.  
> I don't know when I'm going to update. I'm sorry! It's kind of different from my other works...in more ways than one.  
> I will take liberties with magic/


End file.
